Michael P. Jeffries: The word "intersectionality" is one of those words that just...it feels terrible coming out of your mouth. There are too many syllables, it's cumbersome. It embodies all of the reasons that many academics have a hard time communicating with people outside of the classroom or outside of the university

But I think it's important for those of us who work in the academy to give the audience some credit. Like, people who read our work are not just the folks sitting in class, and smart audiences exist outside of colleges and universities. So if you have faith that once you explain something, they won't find is as difficult and disgusting to say, that faith is something that you should act on

The word "intersectionality" is a perfect example of this. It's a messy word, but it means something that I think audiences can get very intuitively. It's the simple principle that, whenever you're thinking about race, you have to be thinking about it in combination with something else, with some other social force like class or gender. That's the only way to really understand how race works and why race remains so powerful -- because it's working in collaboration with these other ideas